Job 4

Eliphaz: The Innocent Prosper

¹Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied:

• JOB 4:1[NOTE]THREE ROUNDS. Chapters 4 to 27 are three rounds of speeches. Each friend talks, and Job answers each one. In round three, Bildad's speech is short and Zophar does not speak at all.

²“If one ventures a word with you, will you be wearied?

Yet who can keep from speaking?

³Surely you have instructed many,

and have strengthened their feeble hands.

⁴Your words have steadied those who stumbled;

you have braced the knees that were buckling.

⁵But now trouble has come upon you, and you are weary.

It strikes you, and you are dismayed.

⁶Is your reverence not your confidence,

and the uprightness of your ways your hope?

⁷Consider now, I plead:

Who, being innocent, has ever perished?

Or where have the upright been destroyed?

• JOB 4:7[ARCHAEOLOGY]A Babylonian poem where a sufferer and his friend take turns talking, like Job and his friends, see The Babylonian Theodicy Field Notes page

⁸As I have observed, those who plow iniquity

and those who sow trouble reap the same.

⁹By the breath of God they perish,

and by the blast of His anger they are consumed.

¹⁰The lion may roar, and the fierce lion may growl,

yet the teeth of the young lions are broken.

¹¹The old lion perishes for lack of prey,

and the cubs of the lioness are scattered.

¹²Now a word came to me secretly;

my ears caught a whisper of it.

• JOB 4:12[NOTE]A SPIRIT IN THE NIGHT. Eliphaz says a spirit gave him this message. God later says the friends did not speak rightly about Him, 42:7, so this is Eliphaz's claim, not God's word.

¹³In disquieting visions in the night,

when deep sleep falls on men,

¹⁴fear and trembling came over me

and made all my bones shudder.

¹⁵Then a spirit glided past my face,

and the hair on my body bristled.

¹⁶It stood still,

but I could not discern its appearance;

a form loomed before my eyes,

and I heard a whispering voice:

¹⁷‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God,

or a man more pure than his Maker?

¹⁸If God puts no trust in His servants,

and He charges His angels with error,

¹⁹how much more those who dwell in houses of clay,

whose foundations are in the dust,

who can be crushed like a moth!

²⁰They are smashed to pieces from dawn to dusk;

unnoticed, they perish forever.

²¹Are not their tent cords pulled up,

so that they die without wisdom?’